Help:Pinyin
Pinyin, or Hanyu Pinyin, is the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. It is often used to teach Standard Chinese and a pinyin without diacritic markers is often used in foreign publications to spell Chinese names familiar to non-Chinese and may be used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into computers. The Hanyu Pinyin system was developed in the 1950s based on earlier forms of romanization. It was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted pinyin as an international standard in 1982. The system was adopted as the official standard in Taiwan in 2009, where it is used for romanization alone rather than for educational and computer input purposes. The word Hànyǔ ( ) means the spoken language of the Han people and pīnyīn ( ) literally means "spelled-out sounds".The on-line version of the canonical Guoyu Cidian (《國語辭典》|labels=no}}) defines this term as: 標語音﹑不標語義的符號系統，足以明確紀錄某一種語言。(A system of symbols for notation of the sounds of words rather than for their meanings that is sufficient to accurately record some language.) See here, accessed 14 September 2012. Usage Pinyin superseded older romanization systems such as Wade-Giles (1859; modified 1892) and Chinese postal map romanization, and replaced as the method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China. The ISO adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese in 1982 (ISO 7098:1982, superseded by ISO 7098:1991); the United Nations followed suit in 1986. It has also been accepted by the government of Singapore, the United States' Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and many other international institutions. The spelling of Chinese geographical or personal names in pinyin has become the most common way to transcribe them in English. Pinyin has also become the dominant method for entering Chinese text into computers in Mainland China, in contrast to Taiwan where Bopomofo is most commonly used. Overview When a foreign writing system with one set of sounds and coding/decoding system is taken to write a language, certain compromises may have to be made. The result is that the decoding systems used in some foreign languages will enable non-native speakers to produce sounds more closely resembling the target language than will the coding/decoding system used by other foreign languages. Native speakers of English will decode pinyin spellings to fairly close approximations of Mandarin except in the case of certain speech sounds that are not ordinarily produced by most native speakers of English: j, q, x, z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, and r'' exhibiting the greatest discrepancies. (When Chinese speakers call out these letters, they read them as: ''ji, qi, xi, zi, ci, si, zhi, chi, shi, and ri. The i'' in the last four sounds more like ''r and the use of i'' is purely a matter of convention.) In this system, the correspondence between the Roman letter and the sound is sometimes idiosyncratic, though not necessarily more so than the way the Latin script is employed in other languages. For example, the aspiration distinction between ''b, d, g and p, t, k is similar to that of English (in which the two sets are however also differentiated by voicing), but not to that of French. Z'' and ''c also have that distinction, pronounced as ts and tsʰ. From s, z, c come the digraphs sh, zh, ch by analogy with English sh, ch. Although this introduces the novel combination zh, it is internally consistent in how the two series are related, and reminds the trained reader that many Chinese pronounce sh, zh, ch as s, z, c (and English-speakers use zh to represent /ʒ/ in foreign languages such as Russian anyway). In the x, j, q series, the pinyin use of x'' is similar to its use in Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Basque and Maltese; and the pinyin ''q is akin to its value in Albanian; both pinyin and Albanian pronunciations may sound similar to the ch to the untrained ear. Pinyin vowels are pronounced in a similar way to vowels in Romance languages. The pronunciation and spelling of Chinese words are generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language, rather than letter by letter. Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), the nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant). Initials and finals Unlike European languages, clusters of letters – initials |''shēngmǔ''}} and finals |yùnmǔ}} – and not consonant and vowel letters, form the fundamental elements in pinyin (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Han language). Every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with exactly one initial followed by one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing ''-r'' is considered part of a syllable (see below). The latter case, though a common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications. One exception is the city Harbin }}, whose name comes from the Manchu language. Even though most initials contain a consonant, finals are not always simple vowels, especially in compound finals |fùyùnmǔ}}, i.e., when a "medial" is placed in front of the final. For example, the medials i and u are pronounced with such tight openings at the beginning of a final that some native Chinese speakers (especially when singing) pronounce yī 衣, clothes, officially pronounced /í/) as /jí/ and wéi ( }}, to enclose, officially pronounced /uěi/) as /wěi/ or /wuěi/. Often these medials are treated as separate from the finals rather than as part of them; this convention is followed in the chart of finals below. Initials 1 r'' may phonetically be ʐ (a voiced retroflex fricative) or ɻ (a retroflex approximant). This pronunciation varies among different speakers and is not two different phonemes. 2 ''y is pronounced ɥ (a labial-palatal approximant) before u''. 3 the letters ''w and y'' are not included in the table of initials in the official pinyin system. They are an orthographic convention for the medials ''i, u and ü'' when no initial is present. When ''i, u or ü'' are finals and no initial is present, they are spelled ''yi, wu, and yu, respectively. The conventional order (excluding w'' and ''y), derived from the zhuyin system, is: Finals The following chart gives the combinations of medials and finals based on an analysis that assumes just two vowel nuclei, /a/ and /ə/; various allophones result depending on phonetic context. In each cell below, the first line indicates IPA, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an ''-r'', which are omitted, the following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals.1 The only syllable-final consonants in Standard Chinese are ''-n'' and ''-ng'', and ''-r'', which is attached as a grammatical suffix. A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language (a southern Chinese language such as Cantonese, or a minority language of China), or indicates the use of a non-pinyin romanization system (where final consonants may be used to indicate tones). 1 ɑɻ is written er. For other finals formed by the suffix ''-r,'' pinyin does not use special orthography; one simply appends r'' to the final that it is added to, without regard for any sound changes that may take place along the way. 2 ''ü is written as u'' after ''j, q, x, or y. 3 uo is written as o'' after ''b, p, m, or f. 4 weng is pronounced ʊŋ (written as ong) when it follows an initial. Technically, i, u, ü without a following vowel are finals, not medials, and therefore take the tone marks, but they are more concisely displayed as above. In addition, ê'' ɛ} }} and syllabic nasals ''m (呒, 呣), n'' (嗯, 唔), ''ng (嗯, ��) are used as interjections. Rules given in terms of English pronunciation All rules given here in terms of English pronunciation are approximations, as several of these sounds do not correspond directly to sounds in English. Letters Pinyin differs from other romanizations in several aspects, such as the following: * Syllables starting with u'' are written as ''w in place of u'' (e.g., ''uan is written as wan). Standalone u'' is written as ''wu. * Syllables starting with i'' are written as ''y in place of i'' (e.g., ''ian is written as yan). Standalone i'' is written as ''yi. * Syllables starting with ü'' are written as ''yu in place of ü'' (e.g., ''üe is written as yue). * ü'' is written as ''u when there is no ambiguity (such as ju, qu, and xu), but written as ü'' when there are corresponding ''u syllables (such as lü and nü). In such situations where there are corresponding u'' syllables, it is often replaced with ''v on a computer, making it easier to type on a standard keyboard. * When preceded by a consonant, iou, uei, and uen are simplified as iu, ui, and un (which do not represent the actual pronunciation). * As in zhuyin, what are actually pronounced as buo, puo, muo, and fuo are given a separate representation: bo, po, mo, and fo. * The apostrophe (') is used before a syllable starting with a vowel (a'', ''o, or e'') in a multiple-syllable word when the syllable does not start the word (which is most commonly realized as ɰ), unless the syllable immediately follows a hyphen or other dash. This is done to remove ambiguity that could arise, as in ''Xi'an, which consists of the two syllables xi ("西") an ("安"), compared to such words as xian ("先"). (This ambiguity does not occur when tone marks are used: The two tone marks in "Xīān" unambiguously show that the word consists of two syllables. However, even with tone marks, the city is usually spelled with an apostrophe as "Xī'ān".) * Eh alone is written as ê''; elsewhere as ''e. Schwa is always written as e''. * ''zh, ch, and sh can be abbreviated as ẑ'', ''ĉ, and ŝ'' (''z, c'', ''s with a circumflex). However, the shorthands are rarely used due to difficulty of entering them on computers, and are confined mainly to Esperanto keyboard layouts. * ng has the uncommon shorthand of ŋ''. * The letter ''v is unused (except in spelling foreign languages, languages of minority nationalities, and some dialects), despite a conscious effort to distribute letters more evenly than in Western languages. However, sometimes, for ease of typing into a computer, the v'' is used to replace a ''ü. Most of the above are used to avoid ambiguity when writing words of more than one syllable in pinyin. For example uenian is written as wenyan because it is not clear which syllables make up uenian; uen-ian, uen-i-an and u-en-i-an are all possible combinations whereas wenyan is unambiguous because we, nya, etc. do not exist in pinyin. See the pinyin table article for a summary of possible pinyin syllables (not including tones). References Category:Chinese language Category:Guides